Simon Memel

Alongside launching the Graduates 2010 feature this morning we interviewed Simon Memel, a graduate from Camberwell College of Art and part of the Graduates 2009 feature who designed this year’s identity…

You graduated last year, what have you been up to since?

I’ve enjoyed life without college, I thought I’d miss it. Without the pressure, I feel that a genuine enthusiasm about my work and the work of others has been able to develop. I’ve done some work at the ICA including an internship with Sarah Boris the designer there, that was an interesting place to be. I’ve done a couple of jobs that were very boring and badly paid, lesson learnt there. I’ve done some work with a couple of friends, some for a couple of friends, a couple of signs. I’ve also been working at the South London Gallery.

I’ve also just returned from India which was very inspiring. The distance allowed me to reflect on my situation back home and to make plans for when I returned. One of these plans was to really immerse myself in my work and to get work done with lots of different people. I think I was feeling very differently a year ago; I think I just wanted a bit of a break from it all.

What was the idea behind the identity for this year’s graduate feature?

I was in India when I first heard from you about it, and being there was surrounded by Hindi. I was fascinated by the type but found it difficult to focus on individual characters. The main reasons for this being that there are (I think) 36 consonants and 14 vowels, of which many are ligatured, and also that each word is grouped by a horizontal line running across the top. Instead of entire characters I began to pay attention to particular sections and shapes.

Thinking this way allowed me to work similarly when I started on the Graduates type; by having 2,3 or 4 sections to work with for each letter, I found I was being led less by how it was supposed to look as a whole, and that I could focus more on the options open to me for each part. I thought that keeping these divisions and having each letter fragmented worked well with the Graduates feature; the bringing together of a group of people from different colleges and disciplines, who’s work is all varied.

What advice would you give to those students graduating this year?

That panicking about getting good marks is not only futile but that it will also make getting good work done more difficult (and that’s the bit that matters). After that stage I guess just try and commit time to your work if that’s what you want to be doing. It’s easy to make excuses about not having enough time after the ammount of time you’ve had to yourself over the last 3 years, but there are still plenty of hours in the day.

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For the last three years, we have selected the most exciting new talent emerging from UK universities and presented them in our annual showcase, The Graduates. We asked a number of these preternaturally gifted lot to create packs for the excellent Granimator™ iPad app, created by ustwo™. We are very pleased to announce that they are great and free and ready to download! The illustrators/designers responsible are Jack Hudson,Sarah Maycock,Tom Edwards and Mike Guppy. Here’s a quick sneak peak at each of their packs…
Granimator is a kit of parts created by artists, designers, studios, illustrators etc. You can manipulate and manoeuvre each element into you own compositions and save, upload and download each wallpaper straight onto your iPad and the Granimator library.

Bryony was one of our 2010 Graduates, but she’s said she’d find it weird to introduce herself as part of our second graduates catch-up, so the responsibility rests with me. As with part one, this post provides insight into what the talented alumni featured on our site this time last year are now, and have been, getting up to. And all you newly graduating students, get your submissions in for The Graduates 2011 soon – the final deadline is tomorrow…h3. Jordan Chatwin

As our call for The Graduates 2011 comes to a close, we’ve decided to revisit last year’s featured few. So in this, part one of our catch-up with the various talented graphic designers and illustrators from the class of 2010, we asked each year-old graduate to show us an image that sums up their year. As with Romilly Winter’s Salad Niçoise, some of these images needed a little explaination so in this article you will find a small paragraph from each creative, plus some concentrated musings for the future… h3. Ana Carolina Gomes

Our final graduate is a bit of a special one. Bryony interned with us during her second year at Camberwell College of Art for a couple of days a week for somewhere near eight months. A constant source of inspiration she would reference and talk about things we felt ashamed not to already know about.

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The team behind Brick magazine have long impressed us with a triple threat of head-pivoting design skills, attention-holding written features and a proven knack for securing hip hop talent: Wiz Khalifa made it onto the cover of issue one, and the magazine has become a who’s who of hip hop’s finest nascent and established stars ever since.

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Alex Grigg’s animated short film Born in a Void is utterly enveloping – not least because of the hypnotic use of perspective, shape and colour the animator used to create an interstellar landscape. This, partnered with the jazz-infused soundtrack, create a unique world for Alex’s abstract characters.

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What do you get when you combine the genie of a lamp living with a bunch of floating eggs? A brilliantly weird animation by Andrew Onorato called Geenie Reenie, that’s what. “The short is about Genie Reenie checking his emails and helping out his friend Dozen, who is a bunch of eggs,” explains Andrew. “They all live together in a house with their friends, some of whom don’t feature in this short.”

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